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Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s controversial legacy

Eva Gabrielsson has written her own book describing the effects of Stieg Larsson's death. (Sarah Dea / for the Toronto Star)

By Gerhard SpörlDer Spiegel

Fri., Aug. 10, 2012

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN—Eva Gabrielsson is already waiting on a sunny park bench. She is a middle-aged woman, both mild-mannered and proud, approachable and shy.

She suggests taking a walk to show me a building on a hill at the end of the promenade. It has a wonderful view of the Baltic Sea and the series of islands that make up Stockholm. Up there, says Gabrielsson, pointing to the large building, is where Lisbeth Salander lived.

Using an assumed name, Lisbeth Salander bought an enormous apartment in the building. She hid there, a place where she felt safe from the members of the murderous sect within the Swedish intelligence service who wanted to kill her, or at least lock her away in an institution.

Gabrielsson talks about how Lisbeth Salander simply showed up in her life one day and took possession of it. She admires Salander for her indomitable spirit and the right she assumes to eradicate the injustice that was done to her.

The building on the hill really exists, but Lisbeth Salander is a fictional character, a creation of Stieg Larsson, and a brilliant one at that. A hacker with a photographic memory and little use for other people, this young, anarchic woman is the heroine in Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, in which she fights to the death with intelligence agents, the police, her father and her half-brother. But Salander also wreaked havoc on the lives of Larsson and Gabrielsson.

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Gabrielsson lived with Larsson for 32 years. Together, they moved from rural northern Sweden to Stockholm. Larsson was a moderately successful journalist who, at some point, began to write a crime novel. He invented a few characters, but they all seemed too virtuous. But Salander was his inspiration, the product of his fantasy, and she became a third party in the relationship.

When Larsson felt pleased with a chapter, he would give it Gabrielsson to read. He became increasingly confident in the crime story, until he eventually said he had 10 books in his head about Salander and the insanity she encounters. But then he died of a heart attack. He had just turned 50.

Shortly before his death, Larsson had submitted the third volume in the trilogy to his publisher, Norstedts, but not a single book had yet been printed. Today more than 63 million copies of the Millennium trilogy — The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest — have been sold.

The book is based on the diary she kept after Larsson’s death. She was in the central Swedish city of Falun on that day, Nov. 9, 2004. By the time she arrived at the hospital, it was too late. It was a death without goodbyes, and she remained shaken by it for a long time, during which she was in therapy. Her book conveys her efforts to regain control over her life, and it contains many moving passages. But Gabrielsson aims to achieve more than that with this book. She wanted to examine what actually happened during that time, she says.

Gabrielsson and Larsson didn’t marry. Under Swedish law, a member of an unmarried couple doesn’t inherit anything from his or her deceased partner, no matter how long the couple was together. Blood trumps love, unless a will exists, but Larsson hadn’t written one. For that reason, the rapidly growing proceeds from the sale of the books and the film rights went to two biological relatives, Larsson’s father Erland (his mother Vivianne is dead) and his younger brother Joakim. “The money went to us, but we didn’t ask for it,” says Erland Larsson, 76. They could have turned down the inheritance, but that wasn’t what they wanted.

The father and the brother still live in northern Sweden, in a city called Umea. The father occasionally visited his son in Stockholm. The brothers, Stieg and Joakim, were not close and rarely saw each other.

After Larsson’s death, when his novels suddenly became such a huge success, Gabrielsson sat down with Erland and Joakim Larsson to discuss what should happen next. An agreement seemed possible. But then attorneys took over the case, and an inheritance war ensued — one in which the Stieg Larsson fan community has participated extensively.

The lives of the Larssons in Umea have changed very little. They haven’t bought any new houses or new cars. They’ve established a foundation and support projects that fit Stieg Larsson’s image. They offered Gabrielsson a portion of the assets and a seat on the foundation board of directors several times, but she refused to agree to a compromise.

Gabrielsson argues that it isn’t about all the money, but about Larsson’s moral legacy. She insists that she knows best who Stieg Larsson really was and what he intended to achieve with his books. If she is to be excluded from the material side of his inheritance, she says, at least she wants to retain the right to interpret his work.

Gabrielsson says that the real Stieg Larsson was concerned about injustice in society, both in life and in his books, about truth between people and about solving the crimes that men commit against women.

Larsson’s main character, Salander, isn’t a victim. She is a furious woman, a warrior who strikes back with the same brutality she was forced to endure. She is no victim, but rather a perpetrator, a character in a grim world who is turned into something mythical.

Who was Stieg Larsson? What did he want? And did he even write his books himself? Many legends have arisen in the years since his death, and Gabrielsson has contributed to some of them.

As a journalist, the real Stieg Larsson was not a great writer. He was saddled with the reputation of not being able to write at all, and it was the blemish of his life. He worked in layout at a press agency for 20 years. When he wanted to switch jobs and become one of the editors at the agency, his boss turned him down, saying that writing just wasn’t his thing.

Later on, he became one of the founders of Expo, a small leftist publication devoted to the fight against right-wing extremism. Larsson’s strength was in research, and his knowledge about neo-Nazis in Scandinavia was encyclopedic. And this was the Stieg Larsson who was supposed to have written the multi-layered, sensationally successful trilogy?

When his books became successful, a few of Larsson’s friends gave interviews and others wrote books, all claiming that they had no knowledge of Larsson’s literary skills and wondering who the real author was. Some suspected it was Gabrielsson. She had co-authored a number of books about urban planning and was considered the more intellectual of the two.

These interviews are embarrassing to Gabrielsson today. She says that she constantly discussed the progress of the book project with Stieg. In fact, she says, they were so close that there were times when she didn’t know which of them had expressed a new thought. After Larsson’s death, says Gabrielsson, she found notes for other projects that she believed were his, but with her name at the bottom.

Gabrielsson finds the struggle over interpretation difficult, because it is also a struggle to survive. “When I lost him, a huge part of me was lost with him,” she writes in her book.

And where is it now? Gabrielsson says that she doesn’t want to talk about it.

In her book, she writes that the fourth volume will be called The Vengeance of God, in which Salander will free herself of her enemies and demons. According to Gabrielsson, Larsson had already written 200 pages. She also writes that she is capable of finishing the book.

But will she?

Oh no, says Gabrielsson, she has changed her mind about that. “Stieg is dead. There are three books. We should leave it at that.”

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